Yeah Mint is pretty good for a “starter” Linux OS. This is subjective, but of all the Desktop OSs, I found myself fixing shit in terminal and nailing down obscure issues a lot less often in Mint than other distros. Also, whenever a friend/family member came to me with a very old and “broken” laptop that needed saving that’s what I’d throw on there. Modern Windows is way too much for the 4GB RAM dual core or whatever bullshit on those old machines. The only complaints I ever got out of them were that they couldn’t run .exes and had to use LibreOffice instead of desktop Office apps, but that’s about it. No crashes outside of legitimate equipment failure.

I ran it on my personal machines before I got more comfortable. Now my ideal setup is KDE/Debian though playing around with cachyOS in VMs has been pretty fun.